The Mufti, the SS, and the Record: What People Should Say About Muslim Collaboration with Hitler

Some Muslim leaders and units did collaborate with Nazi Germany. The record is real, narrow, and often misstated in both directions. It is not evidence that “Muslims” as a people aided Hitler, and it is not a myth invented later.

The Mufti and Berlin

The central figure is Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He had led opposition to the British Mandate and to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s, including the 1936–39 Arab revolt. After the British suppressed that revolt he fled, passed through Iraq during the short-lived pro-Axis Rashid Ali coup in 1941, and reached Berlin that November.

On 28 November 1941 he met Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. The German minutes, taken by interpreter Paul Schmidt and published in *Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945*, Series D, Volume XIII, are the main contemporary record. Al-Husseini told Hitler the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies: the English, the Jews, and the Communists. Hitler said Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews, that this included opposition to a Jewish national home in Palestine, and that once German armies reached the Caucasus he would give the Arab world his assurance that the hour of liberation had come, with the annihilation of Jews living under British protection in Arab lands as Germany’s remaining regional aim. Hitler refused an immediate public declaration of Arab independence, saying the time was not right.

Al-Husseini stayed in the Axis orbit for the rest of the war. He broadcast Arabic propaganda from Berlin, met Himmler and other Nazi officials, and worked to block Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine. He was the main religious and political endorser of recruiting Bosnian Muslims into the Waffen-SS. He was not a decision-maker in the Holocaust. Yad Vashem’s review of the minutes and related files rejects the claim that he persuaded Hitler to launch the Final Solution at that meeting; the power relationship ran the other way, and the genocide was already underway as German policy. He escaped prosecution after 1945, reached Egypt, and died in Beirut in 1974.

Units that fought for the Axis

The clearest military formation was the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Handschar” (Croatian No. 1), raised in 1943 mainly from Bosnian Muslims, with some Catholic Croats. Strength was on the order of 20,000. It was used chiefly against Yugoslav Partisans. Recruitment mixed volunteers, local pressures, pay, and hostility to Serb-dominated Chetniks and Communist Partisans. German officers commanded it; imams were attached for morale. A related formation, the 23rd Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Kama,” was also drawn largely from Bosnian Muslims and was short-lived. Smaller Albanian Muslim contingents appeared in the 21st Waffen Mountain Division “Skanderbeg.”

Elsewhere the pattern was thinner. In the Middle East, some Arab nationalist officers and politicians treated Germany as a lever against Britain and France. The 1941 Iraqi coup sought Axis help and collapsed quickly. Vichy French North Africa and Italian Libya held Muslim populations under Axis or collaborationist control, but mass enlistment for Hitler did not follow. Nazi racial doctrine ranked Arabs and other non-Europeans below Germans; the partnership was an alignment against Britain, not a shared racial program. David Motadel’s research on Islam and Nazi Germany’s war is the standard account of how Berlin tried to instrumentalize Islam and how limited the results were.

Scale, against the Allied side

Those formations were small next to Muslim participation on the Allied side. The British Indian Army grew to about 2.5 million by 1945, all volunteers. Muslim recruitment from a recruitable population listed at about 2.9 million produced roughly 596,000 Muslim soldiers in that army alone, the second-largest community total after Hindus including Gurkhas. Indian divisions with large Muslim contingents fought in North Africa, Italy, and Burma. Force K6, almost entirely Muslim mule companies of the Royal Indian Army Service Corps, was evacuated from France in 1940. Free French forces also included North African Muslim troops. Allied Muslim dead from the Indian Army ran into the tens of thousands.

Handschar and the Mufti’s circle do not balance that. They show that a prominent Palestinian Arab leader, and tens of thousands of Balkan Muslims under occupation and civil war, chose or were drawn into the Axis side for anti-British, anti-Jewish, or local reasons.

What holds up, and what does not

What the archives support: a documented political alliance between al-Husseini and the Nazi leadership; Arabic propaganda from Berlin; lobbying against Jewish refuge in Palestine; Waffen-SS divisions recruited largely from Bosnian Muslims and used in anti-partisan warfare; smaller Albanian and other collaborationist units; opportunistic contacts by some Arab nationalists.

What they do not support: that Muslims as a civilization or majority aided Hitler; that the Mufti designed the Final Solution; that Nazi Germany treated Arabs as racial equals; or that collaboration was the typical Muslim wartime experience. The larger military fact is Allied service, above all in the Indian Army.